November 12, 2012

I started this blog intending to use it, in part, as a way to track my progress in writing the prospective novel from which Long Virginia Sleep takes its name. It really didn't turn out that way, and this blog became something else independent of my fiction writing. This became a means of confession, documentation, and more often than not, waxing poetic about the place that I love beyond reason: Mathews County. As I've come to know Mathews better and spend more time there, my need to write about it from a personal context has waned. I live there, in some sense, and though it remains utterly beautiful and magical and everything that made me fall in love with it as a child, it's also a real place populated by real people, many of whom I'm proud to call my friends, coworkers, and (of course) family. I spent the summer working the bar at Southwind in what I see as a sort of cathartic, circle-closing experience. To end up an employee at the place whose employees and customers were the first to welcome me, truly, into the real Mathews--one that isn't just herons and thunderstorms and bike rides by myself--means more than I can say. I met a boy who loves Mathews like I do, and he's real too. Though I remain inconvertibly a come-here, I feel a part of the place. It's my home. Even now as I sit in my apartment in DC with the National Cathedral rising from the red trees outside my window, I feel Mathew's tug on me, like tide.Yesterday, I wrote the 100th page of the novel. This too feels like a circle closing. I am nervous and tired. But as much as I'm afraid, I'm ready.